Wise move spear. X:X
I run numerous configurations in my bee yard: all mediums, deeps with mediums, and jumbos with shallows. All mediums is just a pain in the butt and don’t build up as fast as the bigger combs in my bee yard. I only fool with mediums to sell to other beeks because they think all mediums is the cat’s meow.
No Georgia Boy, you never lift 12 frame deeps, or jumbos. You leave them were they are and just pull the honey supers.
Spear, to answer your question (wouldn’t that be nice), moving from all mediums to a deep brood box is MUCH easier than going the other direction (deeps to mediums). You can simply put the medium frames in the deep box and the bees will build foundationless on the bottom of the medium frames to make them into deeps. There’s just two potential problems with this approach, the bees probably won’t build all existing 10 frames down exactly strait. The other problem is a lack of physical support for the extended comb.
The first problem can be addressed by putting a few normal sized deep frames between some of the mediums to give the bees a wall to work against when combing down the mediums. Also inspect and fix comb more frequently until they have the mediums converted to deeps. As for the lack of physical support on the extended combs, you’re really not going to be extracting them, so the lack of support isn’t a big issue. Just be careful holding the frames when the comb is fresh. Good luck.